Published in Frieze 170 (April 2015).
Lucas Blalock belongs to a generation of artists, mostly in their 30s and from North America, which is exploring the component parts of photography in a time of dramatic technological change. The results of their investigations vary in form and genre: some work in an abstract vein; others tease apart representation through analogue and digital collage techniques; others exhibit objects that, to a conservative viewer, might only tenuously be described as ‘photographic’. Depending on how widely you wish to cast your net, artists as diverse as Walead Beshty, Talia Chetrit, Sara Cwynar, Jessica Eaton, Shannon Ebner, Sam Falls, Daniel Gordon, John Houck, Artie Vierkant and Hannah Whitaker can be brought together under this rubric of photographic experimentation. And they often are, by museums and galleries newly interested in an artistic medium no longer ghettoized by historical biases against it.
Cover of Frieze 170 (April 2015), featuring a photograph by Lucas Blalock.
Blalock’s signal contribution to this dialogue-through-art is his explicit foregrounding of the role computers and digital processing play in the creation of photographs today. The word explicit is key. The labour that underpins many other photographs, especially those created for commercial or editorial use, is effaced in the final product; the goal is for viewers not to notice the airbrushing, the colour correction or the masking. In the photographs that first brought him widespread attention, such as those in his 2011 solo exhibition at New York’s Ramiken Crucible, Blalock reversed that priority, crafting ungainly digital alterations and exposing them to public scrutiny. It’s a simple premise that yielded profound results. In the last five years, Blalock has exhibited and published a large body of strange, and strangely compelling, photographs – still lifes, mostly, but also portraits and semi-abstract compositions – that encourage viewers simultaneously to decode what is being depicted and to ruminate on how that depiction is constructed.
This counters the transparent accessibility of most photographs today, which is augmented by their presence on screens and the ease with which we can modify them. In early interviews, Blalock referenced Bertolt Brecht and spoke of the ‘theatrical’ nature of his studio work, of how he liked to disclose his working process in order to complicate seamless viewing. In recently published conversations, however, Blalock has begun elucidating a broadened set of intellectual concerns that might best be understood through the term ‘friction’.
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